Things usually weren’t easy at Oralingua School for the Hearing Impaired.

But to the staff at the school, the time there was almost magical.

“It was awesome,” said Kaye Schneider, a teacher who helped start the school and worked there for more than 40 years. “I have a 1,000 stories of amazing kids and amazing parents.”

This month, however, 44 years of history came crashing down after the school closed March 1 due to an inability to pay its bills.

It was the end of a school that earned a worldwide reputation for helping hard-of-hearing children gain the ability to listen and speak.

Over the years, students from Abu Dhabi, India, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia attended the school.

Oralingua survived financial crises and constant criticism from some in the deaf community who called children with surgical hearing implants “cyborgs.”

“We went through a lot, but we always survived,” Schneider said.

Now the approximately 70 children who went to the school are scrambling to find services for their kids, many of whom are still learning to talk.

Gerrardo Perez’s son is 6 years old. The boy received a cochlear hearing implant at age 3 – a little later than normal – and he has about three more years of specialized training before he can enter regular school classes.

“I’ve got him in Ward Elementary in Downey,” he said. “They’re great there, but there is no way my son is getting enough therapy. He used to get one-on-one therapy for 30 minutes three times a week. Now he gets 15 minutes, twice a week, and there are several other students in the therapy with him. It’s no comparison.”

A novel concept

The school was started in 1969 by a group of Whittier-area parents who were worried their children were not being well-educated at public schools, according to Lois Tarkanian, the school’s founding administrator.

St. Matthias Episcopal Church in Whittier donated campus space, and the parents talked Tarkanian into taking charge of the school.

It wasn’t easy, said Tarkanian, who was living in the Pasadena area at the time.

They school had no curriculum and no equipment. They didn’t even have carpet.

“It was a lot of hard work,” said Tarkanian, who eventually moved to Las Vegas with her basketball coach husband, Jerry Tarkanian. “Our floor covering was carpet donated from a local bank. We had parents stitching up pieces of carpet to make them fit the space.”

The staff traveled to conferences all over the country to build a curriculum.

Unlike other schools that concentrated on teaching sign language, Oralingua was always dedicated to helping children hear and speak, Tarkanian said.

At first, children relied on the hearing aids, some of which were so big that they were carried around in backpacks or were set on desks.

Then in the late 1970s, a little girl entered the school with a cochlear implant, a surgically installed device that gives the user a sense of sound.

The devices were pioneered in the late 1960s, but they initially were installed only in adults who had lost their hearing. Over time, doctors began implanting the devices into children.

“She wasn’t the most outstanding academically, but she was a great girl,” Schneider said. “She had a lot of guts.”

The little girl learned to speak and graduated from the school.

The devices grew increasingly popular, and by the 2000s, most of the students at the school had cochlear implants.

The majority of children started at Oralingua at age 1 or 2. By kindergarten, most students were ready for mainstream kindergarten classes and therefore needed no more special education money. Kids who started at older ages or who took longer to learn to speak were able to stay at the school until fourth grade.

“The idea was that the local school districts would commit to spending special education money for a few years, and then the child would go mainstream,” Schneider said.

The money for the school was provided by the 33 school districts the children came from.

Funding battles helped doomed school

By all accounts, the state budget crunch was the biggest reason the school failed.

For decades, districts unable to handle hearing-impaired children contracted with Oralingua to educate the children. During much of the school’s existence, the school and the districts voluntarily worked out a payment plan.

Recently, several districts got behind on payments.

Another factor may have been a decision by Oralingua’s board the last few years to admit children even though Oralingua had no payment contract with the child’s school district.

Instead, many of the parents enrolled their children at Oralingua and then filed legal actions against the school districts to force the districts to pay Oralingua.

About half the students at Oralingua were in the legal process with school districts. Oralingua did not get paid until the cases were settled.

Oralingua Board President Frank Hill said that the strategy was part of an effort to educate children from all ethnicities and socio-economic classes.

The parents almost always won their court cases, but sometimes it took a while for the district to get money.

With a line of credit, the school would have survived, he said.

“We fundamentally believed that even if the families couldn’t afford it, the children deserved an education, so, if we could help, we admitted them,” Hill said.

Judges often sided with the parents based on data from students’ performance at Oralingua, Hill said.

“The judges saw how well the students were doing, and they used that information to make their decisions,” he said.

The “due process” students were a major source of Oralingua’s annual $2.4 million budget, Hill said. He doubted the school would have survived without them.

Hill said it also didn’t help that the school had a philosophical “civil war” in 2009 that led to mass defections by some of the staff.

Some staff members did not get along with Oralingua’s executive director Elisa Roche, a parent who rose to become the school’s executive director.

The school’s principal and one of the teachers sued the school, claiming they were maltreated by Roche and the board. The lawsuits were settled.

A former board member said Oralingua’s governing board had problems for years.

Tax records show that the school over the last decade burned through a $500,000 reserve.

“Let’s just say that the board was preoccupied with other things, and we spent a lot of time dealing with those things and not with the children,” said Dennis Maceri, a USC physician and ear-disease specialist who resigned from Oralingua’s board a year-and-a-half ago.

Maceri was disgusted to see footage of a fist fight on March 1 between a parent and school board member that was captured by video cameras, he said.

The parent wanted to talk to television news reporters on school property, and the fight started between him and a board member.

“That is that exact epitome of what things had come down to,” Maceri said. “It sometimes felt like it had nothing to do with the kids.”

Maceri said the practitioners at the school were the best he has ever met. Children with hearing problems have unique challenges, he said.

“Think of it like this, let’s suppose you have a library with all the shelves and desks and everything you need for a library, but there were no books in there. That’s what these children are like,” he said. “The circuitry is there, but there’s no frame of reference. If you say the word dog, the idea of a dog does not pop up in the child’s brain. He has no reference for that sound. At Oralingua, they were able to fill that library with books. Through therapy, they were filling up the databases of these children.”

Founding administrator: school should start again

Tarkanian said the parents should start a new version of Oralingua.

“The one thing all of these kids had in common, other than hearing problems, were strong, involved parents,” said Tarkanian, who now serves on the Las Vegas City Council.

Using Oralingua’s staff, she believes parents could start a new version of the school.

“If that first group of parents could do what they did with nothing, build up one of the finest programs in the United States and the world, then these parents could start the school again,” she said.

Tarkanian said she considers her time at the school among her best accomplishments.

“In my entire life of things of all the things I’ve done, I would say that Oralingua was one of the best,” she said. “We were all heading toward one goal together. Those teachers worked so hard. They would stay up all night working.”

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